Strong limits on keV-scale galactic sterile neutrino dark matter with stray light from NuSTAR after 11 years of operation

Abstract

Using tremendous photon statistics gained with the stray light aperture of the NuSTAR telescope over 11 years of operation, we set strong limits on the emission of close to monochromatic photons from the radiative decays of putative dark matter sterile neutrinos in the Milky Way. In the energy range of 3-20 keV covered by the NuSTAR, the obtained limits reach the bottom edge of theoretical predictions of realistic models where sterile neutrinos are produced in the early Universe. Only a small region is left to explore, if the sterile neutrinos form the entire dark matter component.

11 pages, 11 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev. Lett

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Return of the Lepton Number: Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production and the Revival of the Shi-Fuller Mechanism
• Phasing out of Darkness: From Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter to Neutrino Masses via Time-Dependent Mixing
• Cosmic Structure Strikes Back: The Elimination of Vector-Mediated Nonstandard Interaction Models as a Mechanism for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter Production
• Decaying scalar dark matter in the minimal left-right symmetric model
• Search for a photon peak from keV-scale dark matter annihilation with NuSTAR: Constraints on $⟨\sigma v⟩$ after 11 years of observations
• Opening up New Parameter Space for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter